Spoken Word: 'Why I Hate School But Love Education' - Suli Breaks

I suspect that many of our young people agree with the images and words expressed by Suli Breaks in this spoken word poem. Listen to his message and let me know what you think?



I think that I was most surprised by how much this British student understood American culture and our American icons. Did you enjoy his flow?

Old School Friday * Band Aid, 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'

Band Aid was a British and Irish charity supergroup, founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia by releasing the record "Do They Know It's Christmas?" for the Christmas market that year.





The record was released on November 29, 1984, and went straight to No. 1 in the United Kingdom singles chart, outselling all the other records in the chart put together.  It became the fastest-selling single of all time in the UK, selling a million copies in the first week alone. It stayed at No. 1 for five weeks, selling over three million copies and becoming easily the biggest-selling single of all time in the UK.

Am I Not Human? Child Slavery in United Kingdom

I imagine that going to Hell is something that all of us want to avoid ... and we can't imagine any reason that a child should have to go to Hell. In the United Kingdom it appears that they don't mind if a child goes to Hell more than once.

Here is the situation as told on Change.org website:

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The United Kingdom is losing children. A recent study found that 55% of child trafficking victims in the U.K. who are identified and rescued eventually go missing. Those children are going to Hell twice in a very short lifetime.

The U.K. is suffering from a guardianship crisis when it comes to trafficked children, namely, that trafficked kids have no guardian and the government isn't providing a good one. One government-run home which lost 77 kids in three years turned out to be a front for a trafficking ring. And Afghan children trafficked to the U.K. have been leaking out of the country faster than BP oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But an issue which before seemed to maybe be a failure of just a handful of agencies now looks to be a system-wide breakdown.

The Home Office's Centre for Exploitation and Online Protection reviewed several local authorities who serve trafficked children and found that over half the kids who are brought in slip through some rather gaping cracks. There are a number of reasons child trafficking victims get lost: they are re-trafficked by the agency or someone else, they run away out of fear of the trafficker, they are deported, or they run back to the trafficker, especially in cases where the trafficker was a boyfriend first.

According to a recent opinion poll regarding this research, 44% of British adults think they way the government is dealing with child trafficking victims is unacceptable. Really? Only 44%? That means over half of British citizens aren't concerned that their government is losing most of the children it rescues from slavery. Can that many people really be ok with the idea of a children's shelter acting as a front for a child trafficking ring? Or the government deporting children who have been enslaved in the U.K. back to war zones? I have to believe the poll response is based on denial that child trafficking exists rather than callous indifference to the suffering of hundreds or even thousands of children.

The U.K. needs to get their act together, and you can tell them to start by stopping the deportation of trafficked children back to Afghanistan. You can also sign the petition created by ECPAT UK and the Body Shop to ask the government to create stronger guardianship guidelines and more comprehensive services for trafficked children.

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Lest we feel superior here in America -- please note that we have our share of human trafficking of children in the United States.

Human trafficking is the third largest criminal industry in the world and it is thought that 1.2 million children and young people are trafficked every year for sexual exploitation and cheap labour.

What are you thoughts on this human rights issue?

Health Care Facts vs. John McCain's Fiction

The United States ranked last in terms of efficiency among five other nations with universal health care, according to a Common Wealth study. The government-run health care system in Great Britain ranked first.

Compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom — the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives.

Efficiency: On indicators of efficiency, the U.S. ranks last among the six countries, with the U.K. and New Zealand ranking first and second, respectively. The U.S. has poor performance on measures of national health expenditures and administrative costs as well as on measures of the use of information technology and multidisciplinary teams. Also, of sicker respondents who visited the emergency room, those in Germany and New Zealand are less likely to have done so for a condition that could have been treated by a regular doctor, had one been available.

John McCain never did let the facts get in the way of his arguments. Am I the only villager who feels blessed that McCain is not currently living in the White House? Check him out as he talks nonsense about health care reform in the United States:




I'm looking for feedback. Share your village voice with us on the issue of health care reform. What are you thinking as you listen to McCain, Obama and others?